Is Your 2013 Planning a Budget Battle? Try Something New - Preference Marketing

Is Your 2013 Planning a Budget Battle? Try Something New - Preference Marketing: It’s budget season for most companies and a key part of the process is balancing revenue targets with investment levels. The CEO’s goal is to get to the right tradeoff between ‘almost-guaranteed’ sales revenue and marketing investment for a smorgasbord of hard and soft benefits.
The CEO has a revenue number they’d like Sales to commit to. Sales, in turn, looks to Marketing for a pipeline commitment and throttles the revenue target up/down according to its’ confidence in Marketing’s pipeline. We all know how the story plays out. In tight times, sales gets budget at marketing’s expense. In the face of clear growth opportunities, marketing may get more budget at sales’ expense. But it’s always a fight leaving all involved bruised and sore with a good amount of lost trust. This ‘zero sum game’ mentality damages culture and morale. Oddly, people wonder why Sales and Marketing don’t get along?
The irony is that both Sales and Marketing are wrong.
At the core, the fight is over leads – which team can generate more bookable leads, cost efficiently. That deeply engrained, age-old premise assumes Marketing and Sales is actually in control of the purchase process. They aren't – the buyer is.
Buyers took control when information became ubiquitous on the Web. No longer dependent upon marketing for information on trends or new ways to solve problems, and equally no longer dependent on Sales to navigate the pros and cons of solutions they were considering – buyers threw off the shackles and rewrote the rules.
Today, buyers engage in a self-directed, trust-based, social purchase process for everything from commodities to software and trains. They no longer buy products or solutions; they purchase outcomes. With their new-found freedom, they have redefined vendor relationships and interaction expectations. They are fully in control and know it.